After two jet-lagged, sleepless nights in New York, I slept at last, last night at the Molly Pitcher Inn in Red Bank, N.J., and felt almost hung-over from having actually slept. Glad I got the sleep, though. Today was my first big design meeting on “Macbeth” at the Two River Theater.

Aaron Posner, the director with whom I conceived this version of the show has an observation he likes to make. Shakespeare always deals with the days you’d want to tell your grandchildren about (if you live to tell the tale). Shakespeare writes about the night you went to a dance and fell madly in love with the daughter of the man your father most hated. The day the ghost of your murdered father told you to take revenge on your incestuous stepfather.

Or in Macbeth’s case, the day he (a) won a battle against a traitor almost singlehanded; (b) became the darling of the king and got – as a present! – a whole new castle and domain; (c) encountered strange beings who predicted he would become king; (d) had the king of Scotland as a houseguest; (e) assisted and egged on by his wife, murdered that king and became the ultimate traitor himself; and (f) seized the crown. That’s quite a bit of excitement for less than one calendar day. It’s what fans of “24” might call a Jack Bauer day.

What makes something a Jack Bauer/Shakespeare day? It’s not hard to name some of the qualities: You feel utterly alive. Everything is in vivid colors and contrasts. Even the smells are stronger. It’s a day that brings out the best in you. You are strong, smart, brave, wily, and beautiful.

It’s a big day.

A few days before our meeting, I’d attended a play with Stephen Sondheim. The play was beautifully staged and acted. It was funny and the audience, and Sondheim sitting next to me, laughed a lot. At intermission he and I went outside for a breath of fresh, cold, early spring air. “They’re wonderful actors,” he said. “It’s funny and very well done. It’s just not big enough for me. I want my plays larger than life. This one is just life-size.”

Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve had a Shakespeare day until afterwards, when you write about it or tell it to friends. Sometimes it’s not until you think back on a big day that you realize that the plumber was really the god Zeus in disguise, testing whether mortals can recognize the divine.

This little production of “Macbeth” feels – and I have no evidence to back me other than intuition – as though it will be a Jack Bauer year. It’s a forty year dream, that began in fantasies as a teenager, so it’s such a huge, hormone-amped dream that I think even failure might have a nobility about it. I’d love it to succeed, but I’d never forgive myself for not trying.

So as an experiment, I’m documenting at least the first steps (it might turn out to be a bust, and all the footage just trash) on video. The documentary idea might well fizzle after I see what we’ve shot. It might be too expensive to make sense. But, for the moment, I’m determined not to let these moments slip away.

So with the help of some of my managerial friends, I found a NY videography team (who did some work on “The Aristocrats”) to videotape the first big session with the design team. He asked us to have our meeting in the theater lobby, where natural light pours in from panoramic windows between huge metal-strapped beams. It’s not the space we planned to meet in, but if this day is to be documented as larger than life, it might as well look that way.

At 2 p.m. our group gathered around the blond wood table. At the end of the table was Aaron Posner, director, thirties, black hair – the buoyant, beaming captain of our little ship. Aaron’s philosophy is that every contribution is welcome; costume designers may comment on lighting and lighting may comment on acting. You have to be very secure and confident to adopt such a policy. Aaron is.

I sat to Aaron’s left and to my left, Matt Holtzclaw, tall, boyish, 28, student of Jamy Ian Swiss. He’s married one year and in love with his wife and the world and magic and horror movies. He’s an expert in Grand Guignol effects, and a very fine magician. He’s in charge of violence and will be collaborating on magic design. To his left, Andrew Martini, the theater’s tech director; owner of a successful international company that supplies lighting to commercial ventures, Andrew took the job in regional theater to satisfy his passion for “real” art. Strong, smart, and quiet.

To Aaron’s right, directly across from me, Thom, the lighting designer, rumpled 26-year-old whiz kid from Yale, in a sweater, dark bedhead hair, teeth stained from cigarettes. Next to him, Dan Conway, set designer, forties, ruddy, round-faced in a sky blue sweater and a laugh to match; Dan teaches set design at a Washington, D.C. college. Having the teaching job allows him to design in regional theater, and to use his design projects as teaching tools. Next to Dan, Devon Painter, one of Aaron’s favorite costume designers, a redhead with the look of a rakish Irish lass.

Aaron introduced the project and I argued that doing the magic described in the play deceptively allows the audience to share Macbeth’s world riddled with superstition, uncertainty, and equivocation.

“Equivocation” is a key for me. It means using an expression that seems to say one thing but actually means another. It’s one of the core ideas of the play.

Typical stage mind-readers equivocate. “What I am doing,” they say, “is not supernatural. Any of you have the same powers I do. I’ve just spent the time to develop my natural gifts.” What they actually mean is, “What I’m doing is lying and tricking you,” but their equivocation makes it sound as though they’re saying, “Mind reading is a natural gift we all share.” Thus they satisfy their critics and conscience (if any), while conveying and capitalizing on a lie.

Macbeth’s world is full of equivocation. Prophecies that sound hopeful have a second, catastrophic meaning. “Fair is foul and foul is fair,” say Macbeth’s supernatural advisors in the first moments of the story. Lies and hallucinations abound. “Function is smothered in surmise,” Macbeth observes, “and nothing is but what is not.”

Our design and magic team’s assignment is to create that equivocal world.

Aaron Posner, the director, asked beaming Dan Conway, the set designer, to jump in and begin the show-and-tell. Dan brought out a portfolio of computer print-outs of art he’d gathered, about a hundred 18” x 24” sheets of images taken from books and Internet sources, all the things that had caught his intuition on the basis of our email discussions. For an hour we passed the paintings, photos, bits of architecture, shots taken from movies, from prisons, madhouses, and ancient Scotland, and we talked about them, pointing out what we loved what did not move us.

We found ourselves drawn to pictures of high places where a man could be trapped, as King Macbeth is, alone at the end of the story, and by cages, pikes, ironwork, industrial doors, peeling plaster.

Then Devon showed us costumes. Here we were drawn to simple, coarse- textured outdoor wear, particularly the simple, sexy lines that are of certain European high fashion. Some of the illusory stuff appealed, too: the clothing that simulates exposed breasts made us all grin. Devon thinks man-skirts are pretty hot, but Aaron is rightly skeptical of something too diagrammatically Scottish.

Now and then, as we looked at these pictures, I would exclaim, “Macbeth! Good luck!” And I’d whistle. Old theater superstition says that saying “Macbeth” or “Good luck” or whistling will bring terrible bad fortune on a show. Theater folk will say, “The Scottish Play,” just to avoid jinxing the activity by uttering “Macbeth.” Penn and I have enjoyed torturing actors and stagehands with this since we first began to work. After an hour or two, Aaron, Devon, and Dan gave up and started to enjoy uttering the forbidden name. But lighting designer Thom will still say it only in context.

“A really weird thing about Macbeth,” Thom said, “is that he’s a professional killing machine. That’s what he does for a living. He’s just been rewarded as a hero for killing traitors. And now, all of a sudden, when he kills this one old guy, the king, he’s a monster and a traitor himself. That’s a pretty complicated moral position, isn’t it?” Equivocal, one might say.

So our lighting designer illuminates not just things and people, but fundamental themes of the play.

Weirdly, for April, it snowed briefly, and the camera crew was eager to catch the snow. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth.

Aaron hates horror movies. It’s almost impossible to get him to watch one. It’s not that they don’t work on him. They work too well. He has no defense mechanisms and they just terrify him. Doing this show is a huge step for him.

So it was fun watching him squirm as Dan showed us a video his students had prepared, featuring film imagery they felt echoed “Macbeth.” Matt offered a choice clip from “Session 9,” a horror movie set in an abandoned mental hospital, and featuring a disturbing, fetishistic torture chair, which Matt thought might be a nice model for our throne.

He played us the sequence of “Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where the sexy young couple comes on a pretty spring day, amidst sun-dappled sunflowers, to the farmhouse where we know they are destined to be butchered. I remarked how well Shakespeare had ripped that off (four hundred years earlier) by having King Duncan arrive at the castle where he is about to be slashed to death, and remark on the castle’s sweet air and chirpy birds.

We’d been at it for three hours and were ripe for a coffee break. So, we went to Wawa. Tom loves Wawa. He had missed lunch. So he had a sandwich. And cigarettes. Everyone chugged coffee. We returned to the theater. Aaron brought down a plate of cookies from the office pantry.

Aaron asked me to talk technically about the magic. So I gave a brief course in “black art” and mirror masking. I showed pictures in books I’d brought and photocopies I’d made.

I went through the show, trick by trick: Weird Sisters appear, Weird Sisters vanish; dagger appears, vanishes, reappears covered with blood, points the way to the king’s chamber, vanishes; ghost of Banquo appears and vanishes twice; three apparitions (bloody talking fetus, severed head in armor, live child with glowing eyes) emerge from a cauldron, cauldron vanishes, Weird Sisters vanish; Lady Macbeth’s hallucinates blood on her hands.

Now we were getting into it. Deep. Talking practicalities and angles. I wanted everyone to leave with enough practical knowledge of magic that we could talk comfortably via email for the next month. At Johnny Thompson’s suggestion, Andrew Martini had prepared a setup onstage for looking at images projected on smoke. We bundled ourselves into the auditorium and were awed to see how beautiful – and deeply eerie – that looked.

We returned to the table and everything was getting very intense and very fast.

How do we make the Weird Sisters the equivocal creatures Shakespeare describes: wild, withered, androgynous things so unearthly and shriveled that Macbeth can’t tell whether they’re alive or dead? Do we want the set dark – to follow the language? Or light – to force the audience to create the darkness in their own minds? If dark, what kind of dark? Black on black and let Thom’s light wizardry create the color we want when we need it…?

There is nothing in the world that I love more than creative collaboration. And to be in the presence of these amazing artists, all joyfully planning how to scare the pee out of an audience with a four hundred year old horror story, well, the only word I can think of is ecstasy. Plain and simple. Ecstasy.

We carried the conversation – and our videography team – along with us to dinner at The Brothers Pizza and restaurant. Red and white plastic tablecloths. Jersey accents. Burgers. Tortellini. Chicken Caesar salad. Dan’s was the last dish delivered (“Who would have thought that this restaurant would rely on fresh kill for my veal Parm’ platter?”). From all the eating and talking Aaron began seriously, Heimlich-maneuver seriously, choking. Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth.

Back at the theater afterwards to finish up. We were newlyweds determined to get pregnant before we had to part for a few months. As our final objective, we agreed to choose a few images everybody loved. A shrieking, abstract wrought iron fence, something as ‘twere out of Edvard Munch. A massive “Texas Chainsaw” sliding door in Eastern State Penitentiary. And a vaulted underground room in the present day Cawdor Castle (Macbeth, in the play, becomes Thane of Cawdor). In the center of the room, encircled by a 5-foot-high wrought iron fence, an ancient dead tree emerges through the floor and out the ceiling.

Dan was sketching from our discussion and was about to pack up. He had a long drive ahead, back to Washington, D.C. Suddenly I looked at his sketch and an idea flashed into my head. I asked if he could stay another five minutes. Then I drew something – something I’d rather not disclose to you just yet – that could make it possible for the apparitions from the cauldron and the final vanish of the Weird Sisters to be a truly stunning sequence. Everybody liked the idea. The last drop of the day’s thinking contained the answer I’d been searching for all day.

Our group was now officially brain dead. The tireless videographers turned off their cameras and packed up their tripods. Aaron – who had done a full day’s work before any of our meetings – looked nearly unconscious. Dan, bleary-eyed, filled his coffee cup for the long drive. Matt, Devon, and Tom bundled up warm and headed for the train station.

I bounded back to my hotel in the chilly air and couldn’t fall asleep for the next four hours. I’d been looking forward to this meeting for forty years. And it’s hard to unwind at the end of a Jack Bauer day.

Teller

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